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Silk hosiery · A Wayne Knitting Mills subsidiary
On the record
Founded: 1909, Fort Wayne. The Immigrant Entrepreneurship biography states that in 1909 Theodore F. Thieme invited his brother John to help him form the Thieme Brothers Company, a Wayne Knitting Mills subsidiary dedicated to silk hosiery. A contemporary Fort Wayne News and Sentinel of 20 October 1909 reports the new silk mill building on Knitters Avenue completed and being equipped — six large machines installed, more en route, in operation by 1 November, employing at least 200 men and women in addition to the Wayne Knitting force. Flag: the 1909 newspaper report does not name Thieme Brothers in the text in hand; it corroborates a Wayne Knitting silk operation starting in autumn 1909, and the subsidiary’s name and formation rest on the biography.
Founders: Theodore F. Thieme and his brother John A. Thieme (John Andrew, born 1858) (biography). Conflation warning, printed with the entry: the name “Thieme Brothers” also belongs to two other family firms — the father’s generation’s J.G. Thieme and Bro. clothing business and Gottlieb and John’s tailoring firm Thieme Bros. Neither is this company; any account merging the 1909 silk-hosiery subsidiary with the brothers’ tailoring firm is misidentified on the evidence in hand.
What it did: manufactured high-grade silk hosiery — the high-end line Wayne Knitting Mills (entry 29) branched into as American demand for silk stockings grew. Its plant was the new fireproof silk mill building of 1909: three stories and a basement, iron, concrete and brick, on the west side of Knitters (Growth) Avenue opposite the main Wayne Knitting factory (1909 newspaper).
Course: a profitable subsidiary — it contributed $65,000 in profits in 1919 and $100,000 in 1920 to Wayne Knit’s overall profits (biography), the only financial figures in hand, carried as that source gives them. No separate employment, capital or sales figures for the firm were found, and none are stated.
Fate: excluded from the 1923 Munsingwear sale; reorganised as an independent company; its Fort Wayne branch sold c.1925, with the buyer not established. Theodore completed a West Coast expansion begun with a Los Angeles land purchase in 1921: the Los Angeles branch, opened 1923 and named Theme Brothers Hosiery — the “i” deliberately dropped to distinguish it from the Fort Wayne original — was staffed by former Wayne Knitting department heads and managed by John. About 1925 Theodore sold the Fort Wayne branch — the buyer is not named in any source in hand — and withdrew from all business activity, entrusting the Theme Brothers company to John. The Los Angeles company’s course after 1925 is not established on sources in hand.
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- § 05 — business
Sources: Immigrant Entrepreneurship, “Theodore Frederick Thieme” — https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/theodore-frederick-thieme/ ; Fort Wayne News and Sentinel, 20 Oct 1909, via ACGSI — https://www.acgsi.org/genweb/fort-wayne/wayne-knitting-mills-fort-wayne-indiana.html ; News-Sentinel Cityscapes, “Fort Wayne Knitters,” 14 Nov 1982 — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/scapes30.php . Sources as cited in the profile.